NATURALIST JIM CONRAD

Naturalist Jim Conrad; image by Richard Newland Jim Conrad in 2022
image by Richard Newland
Main field of interest: Teaching nature-study techniques, and philosophizing about why understanding nature is so important.

Education: M.Sc. in Botany, B.Sc. in Biology & Geology

Background: Born in 1947, Jim grew up on a small tobacco farm in western Kentucky, in the southeastern USA.

After college he served as a naturalist in a Kentucky state park, then for three years worked at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. While there he collected plants for taxonomic research in several Latin American countries.

Then he began his main career as a freelance writer focusing mostly on topics relating to natural history. For his work he has traveled in about forty countries, in the process publishing over 200 magazine articles and stories, and six books. His most popular comercial books are MEXICO: A Hiker's Guide to Mexican Natural History and The Maya Road. Now he gives away his later books, downloadable here.

Jim tries to live life according to these basic principles: Voluntary simplicity; minimum environmental impact, and; the study and teaching of Nature as spiritual meditation. If you'd like a glimpse into how that life has worked out since his Naturalist Newsletter's beginnings in 2001, click here.

Most of Jim's regularly published, commercial books are out of date and out of print, though some still can be found if a web search is done on the key words "jim conrad books." Use quotation marks to avoid the many pages on Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

During his writing career he also served on several plant-collecting expeditions in the Americas and Africa. For several summers he worked as a botanical illustrator at the University of Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany and as a naturalist at a "jungle lodge" in Belize. For two years he was mainly based in Waloonian Belgium, too.

In early 1997 Jim became an Internet-connected hermit/naturalist in the forests and fields of southwestern Mississippi. During this time he dedicated himself fully to advancing environmental education and cross-cultural sensitization by establishing appropriate websites. His first efforts resulted in the creation of the once-popular EarthFoot's Free Ecotour Posterboard, which disappeared when FaceBook came along. Most recently he has developed the Backyard Nature website, as well as several other online books and sites.

Since 2005 Jim has wandered a bit, bartering labor of various kinds for lodging, in the process depositing onto the Internet information about nature in California's Sierra Nevadas, Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains, Kentucky's Bluegrass Region, the southern slope of southwestern Texas's Edwards Plateau, and the Mexican states of Yucatán, Querétaro, and Chiapas Currently Jim is living in the uplands of central Mexico.

Jim's latest project is his online ebook, Nature-Study Meditation: Mother Nature as Therapist in Anxious Times.

You can write to Jim by clicking here.